


The Turning Point

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Category: White Boots - Noel Streatfeild
Genre: Community: ladiesbingo, F/F, Fade to Black, Femslash, First Time, Future Fic, Ice Skating, Paris - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 14:00:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13503029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: Harriet has spent a lifetime pretending she doesn't want things. It's just possible that, if she really wants to get them, she's going to have to stop pretending.





	The Turning Point

Paris has looked smarter than it did in the January of 1956. But to Harriet Johnson, who had been born in bomb-ravaged London, it was all gleaming lights and tall, stately buildings, a fairytale city.

Fairy tales can have sad endings, too, particularly for those who happen not to be the youngest of three brothers or the only child of a king. There are plenty of wanderers who make their best guess at an answer to an impossible question and get it wrong, plenty of princes who are turned back by rose-thorns that won't let him past. For every hero who wins the prize, there's everyone else in the story, who doesn't.

And there are fables where the runner who is well ahead at the half-way point falls to last place by the end of the race.

* * *

Harriet had been the last to skate, but she had no desire to linger. She had already changed back into her jersey and skirt by the time Lalla had managed to talk her way past the officials and find her. Lalla was wearing a chic suit with a very full skirt. It could well have been a real Dior.

'Oh, Harriet,' she said.

The wonderful thing about Lalla was that she never said anything stupid like _Better luck next time_ , or, _It's only a game_. She knew exactly how important it was.

'I know,' Harriet said.

'You were so far ahead in the figures.'

'I know.'

Lalla hugged her. 'I don't have a show tonight,' she said. 'Aunt Claudia has some sort of party, and she said did you want to come, but I think that if we phone her up and tell her that you'd rather not, she won't mind.' Even Lalla was not so tactless as to say that Claudia King was really only interested in Harriet for as long as she could introduce her as _my niece's friend, the medallist_ , but they both knew it.

'I don't know what I do want to do,' Harriet said.

'Who do you have to report to? We'll tell them that that's what you're doing, and then change our minds on the way.'

* * *

They ended up going nowhere in particular, taking a bus there because they needed to get back into the centre of Paris and Lalla had always thought buses more interesting than taxis. Her show had been in Paris for some weeks now, and she was beginning to know her way around.

'I've always thought it looked tremendously fun to ride on the back of one of these,' she said, 'but they're usually full of smokers, and Aunt Claudia would kill me if I came back smelling of tobacco.'

But for four stops there were no smokers, and Lalla and Harriet clung onto the silvery poles that held up the canopy, and watched Paris pass in a blur of white lights and red lights, of chilly air and petrol fumes, and conversed by shouting over the roar of the engine.

'You can do all those jumps,' Lalla yelled. 'I've seen you. But even that wouldn't be so bad if you didn't look so much like a scared mouse dashing around the rink, trying to find a way out before the cat comes.'

Harriet could not help laughing. 'If only they could make the two of us into one skater, we'd win everything!' she shouted back.

At the fourth stop two men got on, cigarettes glowing red, and Harriet and Lalla moved inside the bus, and found that they did not have to shout quite so loudly to make themselves heard.

'I don't understand,' Lalla said. 'Don't you want to be there? Don't you want to win it?'

But of course Lalla wouldn't understand, Harriet thought. 'I do want it. More than almost anything.'

Lalla raised her eyebrows at the _almost_ , but she said, 'Your mother can do it. She can't skate, of course, but you can see that if she could she'd know how to do the free. She wears the most ancient things and nobody notices because there's something about her that says, _I'm Olivia Johnson, and isn't this lovely for all of us._ You need to do that.'

'I just don't know how,' Harriet said miserably. 'I don't mind the figures, because I can just ignore the audience.'

Lalla nodded. 'More than that. You have to.' And that had always been _her_ downfall.

'And I can just about get away with the short. The free, though, that's where it all falls to pieces, because everyone is looking at me. And I know you always enjoyed that, but I never have.'

Lalla squeezed her arm. 'You always think you're not worth looking at. It simply isn't true.'

Harriet felt warm.

* * *

At the Opéra they got off the bus. 'Our hotel isn't far away,' Lalla said. 'There's a place I know where we can get a cup of coffee and talk about everything that isn't skating. Oh, Harriet, it's so lovely to see you.'

'I've missed you,' Harriet said.

'I've missed you, too. Sometimes I wish we could both... well, never mind.'

'I know,' said Harriet. It was not something that she let herself think about often, knowing how fortunate she had been to have tagged along after Lalla until at last she had overtaken her. She owed everything to Lalla and she knew that it was greedy to want more. But there were very few occasions when she could say what she really thought, and she saw Lalla so seldom these days, so she went on, 'It's so awful, to want something and want something and know you're never going to have it.'

'How can you say that, when you're standing where you are?' Lalla waved a hand in the air, showing that she did not mean the Rue de Mogador, but Paris in general, or, rather, Paris, specifically, the venue for the European Figure Skating Championships.

'I know,' Harriet said again. 'I'd just like to have you there too, that's all.'

'Miss Lalla Moore doesn't care to compete. She finds it all dreadfully sordid.'

It was such a magnificent lie that Harriet laughed. 'No. You didn't ever want to be a champion, not really. You only wanted to skate, and have people see you skate.'

'That's true,' Lalla admitted. 'All the same, I do know.'

'Know what?'

'What you said. What it's like to want something and want something.'

'It's awful,' Harriet said. 'And you can't let people see that you want it, because their pity when you don't get it is just so humiliating.'

'But you have to,' Lalla said, 'or you might never get it. When you want something, you just have to take it.'

'But what if it's something that you really can't have?'

'You could have a gold medal. You could have an _Olympic_ gold medal, if you only believed it.'

Harriet nodded. 'It isn't that. Sometimes I think I don't want that _enough_ , sometimes I think that if only I concentrated more on the skating I'd forget about everything else. And then sometimes I think that it's the reason that I don't do better in the free, because I just don't let myself want anything enough.'

'Then what is it?' Lalla took her arm.

Harriet thought for a while, knowing what it was that she wanted to say, but not how. 'Alec said, when I first started competing and having to spend nights away from home, _Harriet's in less danger from the skaters than she would be anywhere else._ I didn't realise, at first, what he meant, not until I understood about Fred and Mr Grange. And then I overheard Aurélie Couteraud talking about a couple of the Olympic skiers, and I saw that it didn't only have to be the men.'

'I didn't know that your French was as good as that,' Lalla observed infuriatingly.

'It didn't need to be,' Harriet said, with feeling. 'I only needed to hear the names and _derniers jeux Olympiques_. The rest of it was obvious.'

'It still sounds a bit of a jump. You ought to be careful; you don't want to be sued for slander.'

Harriet did not point out that she had not, in fact, named any names. Instead, she said, 'Oh, Lalla. Do you think I care about French skiers? It made sense of _me_.'

' _Oh_ ,' Lalla said. 'You, too?'

'Me too? Who else?'

Lalla laughed. 'I said, didn't I, that I knew about wanting something I couldn't have.'

'You did,' Harriet said.

'And I said that when you want something, you have to reach out and take it.' It was barely a murmur.

'Yes,' Harriet said, quieter still.

Lalla's eyes were wide and bright in the lamplight. 'I'm going to do that.'

' _Yes_.' Then, 'Only, not here.'

There were few people in the street, but there were enough.

'We'd better go to my hotel,' Lalla said. 'We'll just have to risk Aunt Claudia.'

* * *

Madame King was out, said the man on the desk. Lalla nodded. ' _S'il vous plaît,_ ' she said, ' _pouvez-vous lui dire que je suis rentrée au lit? Je voudrais parler à mon amie sans être interrompue._ '

_Please could you tell her that I have gone to bed? I want to talk to my friend without being interrupted._

And that might have been the truth; it was the truth; but it was not all of the truth. It was the truth for as long as it took them to thank the man on the desk and the man who worked the lift. But as soon as Lalla's bedroom door closed behind them, they were not talking, but kissing. Harriet had never thought much about kissing people; it had always seemed uninteresting when there was skating to be done. Now she was not sure whether she was more frightened or exhilarated. This was Lalla, who she had admired since the first moment she saw her on the ice. This was Lalla, who had been Harriet's first and best friend. This was Lalla, and you never knew quite where you were with Lalla.

But it was strange and new for Lalla, too, at least if her expression of delighted surprise was anything to go by, and Harriet could not bring herself to worry.

After a little while, Lalla said, very softly, 'Harriet.'

'Yes?'

'Is this all you want?'

Harriet wanted to look down. She didn't. 'It's more than I hoped for.'

'But if there could _be_ more... would you want it now, or would you want to wait?'

Harriet knew what Lalla was talking about: changing room gossip had its uses. She did not quite know how it could be applied in this particular case, but after a whole evening of admitting to wanting things she felt reckless and mad-doggish. Why, she thought, should anything go wrong if she admitted to one more? And the championships were over; she was going home tomorrow, and Lalla would be going off to the next stop on the tour.

'Now,' she said.

* * *

'The awful thing about wanting something,' Harriet said, as she was fastening her skirt, 'is that you might get it.'

Lalla sat up, with a most un-Lalla-like expression of dismay. 'Did you not like it...?'

Harriet sat down again. 'No! That wasn't what I meant at all. It was the most delicious thing I've ever done.'

'What do you mean, then?' Lalla curled up against Harriet's back, like a cat.

'You might get it, and you might not want to give it back again.'

'I should hope not,' Lalla murmured lazily.

'But Lalla, I'm going home tomorrow.'

'So you are,' Lalla agreed. 'But so am I, at the end of this tour. It isn't so very long. I'll come and... help you with your free skate.'

Harriet felt happiness expanding inside her like a balloon. 'Promise?'

'You just try keeping me away,' Lalla said.

* * *

Harriet Johnson never won a free skate, but she won plenty of championships, and she got what she wanted, once she knew what that was.

**Author's Note:**

> For the Ladiesbingo prompt 'There's a first time for everything: first times'
> 
> Dates in _White Boots_ are vague. I think Harriet and Lalla are about seventeen here.


End file.
